Oh joy. Maybe Brice will put up 30 against us in a 90-60 rout. 
I mean, i wouldn’t mind him getting 30 since we win by 30 anyways.
Nebraska lost best player (exhausted his eligibility) and awaiting a decision by third leading scorer as concerns the portal. So Brice may be THE guy in Lincoln next season. His highest scoring game came in OOC when he put up 25 vs Oregon State. Also had nine games of single digit output.
No pineapple for the defectors ! 
Doesn’t really mean anything right now but here’s last season’s NET etc:
33 Nebraska (23-11) NCAAT
85 Loyola Chicago (23-10) NIT
97 Charleston (27-8) NCAAT
114 CHARLOTTE (19-12)
165 Oregon State (13-19)
177 Hawaii (20-14)
Well, Brice is definitely THE guy now:
I’m still undecided air out future. However, I’m confident last years team could have been special next year had the team stayed together for 1 more year.
I said all year that I could nit wait to watch this team next year with all the returning talent. Little did I know.
I would love to hear people’s opinions about expectations for next year. Is it possible next year’s team could be better than last year’s?
Anything is possible. I just don’t see how rebooting every year at our level works long term. Some years you might be better others not so much. It’s basically a roll of the dice every year that the talent you pay for can play and play together.
Every team is dealing with it but just more pronounced at our level.
Luckily we play teams on our level and everyone else is dealing with it too. Is it as fun? Definitely not. We also shouldn’t kid ourselves that a lot of kids were hired guns before all this craziness. Read I Charlotte Simmons, written in 2004.
I don’t like the changes in the landscape at all, and some of the craziness will have to be addressed, but we are no more hopless than any of our league mates before this. Frankly it’s probably a good thing SMU is leaving because they were the only financial powerhouse in the conference.
We’ve just got to suck it up and march on.
Memphis has a huge corporate sponsored NIL pool.
No we don’t have to suck it up and move on. I can walk away with my attendance or financial support or both. This was never all about winning to me which is why I’ve stuck around through all the bad shit. I can certainly at minimum redirect financial giving to students who actually need it.
Half of my agitation is at the landscape shift impact on my emotional connection to the players. The roster turnover and mercenary nature has absolutely destroyed that. Could winning help that? Maybe. But knowing we basically are buying all the rotational players for a year makes me doubt it.
The other half of my agitation and the reason why I’m withholding my financial support to these sports is the philosophical issue with charging our students fees to fund this. It absolutely wrong and no amount of winning is going to make me feel less dirty about that.
It’s like if the city charged every resident a Panthers fee, not just for the stadium but for the operational nature of the panthers and that fee made sure the panthers made money and then on top of getting free housing and food from the city the players said yeah we want to make more money and you don’t have a choice but to fund this. Oh and in addition we would like people to just give away and donate money to this for profit endeavor as well and also we don’t really like your city or community either - but still give us money. If not YOU are the bad guy.
Yes college sports have always had an air of shadiness but it was never like this. I have two kids - many other options to spend time and money besides something I have little emotional connection with. That GJ donation every year can serve much better purposes for now it’s going mostly to our soccer programs.
I think that there’s a strong argument to be made that the players should be paid a share of revenues excluding any student fees. Of course that opens the door for the athletic departments to fund their operations from student fees and then use all their donations to pay the players. So it’s kind of just juggling the books to make it work.
It’s simple in my mind. Separate revenue sports, don’t take student fees to fund them. Make a profit and let the athletes get some of it. Nonprofit, no payment. Let them self support.
If there is sooooo much money being made with revenue sports then that shouldn’t be an issue.
I know some players have always been getting paid under the table but it was only top players that were worth getting in trouble for. No one was going out of their way to pay our 6’ 2", 195 lb point guard, who struggles against bigger more athletic guards, 10’s of thousands or 100’s of thousands of dollars to come play in the B10. If you’re a low to mid major player and average double figure scoring and or 5 or more rebounds you can now get paid like a McDonald’s All American. It’s a clusterfuck and once schools can pay players directly from their tv revenue It’s going to get much worse. The only advantage then might be contracts but it’s going to be really hard to get anyone to sign a contract to play here to get more playing time for $20k per year when they can sit on the bench at a P4 for $100k. It’s just a massive clusterfuck. We might as well start recruiting high school again because the P4 are only recruiting the best players from low and mid majors and the very top players from high school. We can’t compete with them so we need to use a different approach to find talent.
At this point, only sure thing is that Memphis will be the preseason favorite and that’s not likely to change as long as Hardaway is the head coach. Once again, he’s restocked the Tiger roster, but as last season showed, that doesn’t necessarily translate into the ultimate goal of making the NCAAT.
clt says memphis needs an actual coach
I’m really looking forward to the actual games next year. I just like watching basketball and it’s better if it’s the Niner’s.
They are part of my life now for almost 40 years and I’m not stopping now.
Would I prefer a more equitable structure and possibly a new division that allows us to compete for a title. And possibly reduce our participation and exposure to this current madness?
Hell yeah.
I don’t care what division or conference we are in.
As long as I get to go see them play.
On student fees.
I refuse to believe they will pass legal challenge if the players become employees and earn money over current scholarship levels directly from the schools.
I think that will create the dividing line.
The schools that can survive without student fees and those that can’t.
Those that can’t should not be in the same division and should not be paying players.
In our situation there is no money to directly pay the players because we don’t have enough actual revenue sans the student fees to survive much less pay players.
This will all come out in the wash once these court cases are settled and new regulations are in place.
I’m still waiting for the elite (or maybe not so elite) institution who just says to hell with it and either drops sports or goes D3.
I thought it would have happened by now. But apparently the lock college sports has on the American college educated is too strong. College football is the plaything of the rich and powerful. Perhaps too powerful for an institution to drop out of the rat race.
And for those of you out there who proposed that we should take the offer of full membership from the southern conference when it was on the table. You may have been right. If we had done that would we have had more fun over the last 10 years??
I don’t care as much as i used to, so I’m not too worried about it. But one particular concern for teams at our level is that it will be even harder than at the top teams to get players to fill roles on a team. How do you convince your 3rd best scorer to defer to the better scorers when a payday like this is on the line? It will look more and more like AAU ball. Why play hard defense late in the season when it could jeopardize your transfer money if you get injured? The incentives could get the most out of whack for mid-level conference teams.